


behind my shoulder

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2016 [10]
Category: Doctor Who, Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Season One, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Chameleon Arch, Claudia Stilinski is her own warning, Crossover, Gen, Grief, Hurt Stiles, Loneliness, Loss, Mental Illness, Not Beta Read, Open Ending, Prompt Fic, Wishlist Fic, Wishlist_Fic, identity crisis, major character deaths, psychic Stiles
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-15
Updated: 2016-12-15
Packaged: 2018-09-08 18:04:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,311
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8855602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: In which Stiles opens the damn watch and nothing is right anymore.(Wishlist, Day 10)





	

**Author's Note:**

> Rhymesofblue asked for Psychic Stiles and the Doctor, gen and really angsty. As I'm convinced that the angstiest thing in this world is the question "Why?" and a lack of answer, here we are.
> 
> The title is from Matthew & The Atlas' _Out of the Darkness_. [Listen to it on youtube while you read](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jgleXclGvQ).

+

Stiles is eight when he finds the watch. 

He is eight and Mrs. Danvers from the community center asked his dad if he had anything to donate to the fund raiser rummage sale they’re doing next weekend and his dad said yes and forgot all about it. 

He is eight and going through his mother’s things, wiping away two years’ worth of dust and forgetting, when he finds the watch. 

It’s an old-fashioned fob-watch, the kind men wear in old westerns, but with strange markings. Most of Stiles’ memories of his mother include the watch, the way she smoothed her fingers over the front, kept it on her at all times, and never, ever opened it. 

He took it once, just to look at it, and she screamed at him and locked him in the bathroom for two hours until his dad came home and let him out. 

At the hospital, the watch was the only thing that kept her calm. Every time one of the nurses tried to get her to put it down, she raged. 

Stiles hates that watch.

So it’s spite, more than his insatiable curiosity that makes him click the button and open it. Just to see what’s inside the damn thing. Just so he knows what it was his mother loved more than him, remembered longer than him. 

Then he’ll give it away. After all, it’s just a wa-

+

There’s noise and screams and pain, voices falling silent in the back of his head as her people die in droves, the battle lighting up the sky as Arcadia falls, falls, falls and 

he perches in the open hatch of his TARDIS, watching a sun go supernova, 

watches a black hole eat an entire system of stars, 

changes his face

and his face  
and his face, and runs,  
and fights, and gets so tired of all the dying, of the endless battles from the dawn of time to its end,  
and his face,  
and his face,  
and the fire and the explosions and Arcadia falling, falling, falling,  
and the fear and the nightmares, the psychic screams echoing long after their owners have been burnt to cinders and erased from time and the arch, the arch and a chance at a lifewithoutfirewithoutwarwithoutlossjustmakeitstopmakeitallstopIdon’twantto - 

+

Stiles is not a time lord. 

Stiles is not the owner of the memories inside that watch. 

Stiles is not even a time lord’s son, because his mother’s DNA was entirely human when she married his father, fell pregnant and gave birth to him. Was still human when she died without ever having regained what she hid from herself.

The watch does not change Stiles into something else. 

But it does rip his skull wide open and shove in all the dreams (nightmaresmemories) a time lady who was once called the Dreamer ever had. 

She’s dead, the thing inside the watch mourns, she is dead, so it falls to her son (tiny, apelike thing that he may be) to dream the nightmares that she cannot dream herself anymore. 

Stiles screams.

+

He spends four days in bed with crippling migraines and the occasional bout of throwing up before the memories of two thousand years of life and death and war and change stop splitting his brain at the seams, trying to turn him into something he never was and never can be.

On the fifth day, he showers, dresses himself, and packs his bag to go to school. 

As he steps outside the house, he can feel the way the earth spins under his feet, can guess at the path of the car coming down the street, senses the hum of Mrs. Kandinski two doors down as she works up a lather over her son leaving his dirty shoes in the hall again, can taste the hole in the ozone layer and the pollution in the air, can smell the rain coming in from the coast and feel the minuscule particles of ash from the Hale fire, two weeks past, settling on his skin, can feel the dead pieces of soul (no such thing, the Dreamer in the back of his head tells him) in the ashes and the grief wafting with them. 

And he knows that for all that the watch could not make him the Dreamer, it did make him _something_. 

His mother’s last gift to him was to rip him to pieces and leave his mind scattered around the shard of herself wedged in him like a splinter.

And no matter how much he worries at the wound, he’ll never get her out again. 

+

The doctors diagnose him with ADHD three months later, all his grades turn to straight As and he stops crying at night for his lost parents because a part of him hasn’t had parents in two millennia. 

A part of him is one of his parents. 

Except not, because Claudia Stilinski was never the Dreamer and the Dreamer was never her. He tries to put it all into words, fails, gets another migraine, downs the pills the doctor gave him and predicts the weather patterns for the next three weeks for no reason other than that he can. 

(Can’t even figure out _why_ , but he can.)

+

He gives answers before people ask their questions, tells secrets he can’t possibly know, predicts the unpredictable and dreams of Arcadia falling, falling, falling, builds a bomb in chemistry and gets suspended for a week, tries to make friends and scares everyone away. (Everyone except the most oblivious boy in his year, the most head-in-the-clouds person he has ever met, who looks at Stiles and sees not the walking disaster he is, but a person.) 

His father asks him, once, just once, what the hell happened to him. He’s drunk because Stiles has stopped pouring his whiskey down the drain, understanding that the alcohol is not the problem, but a symptom. A symptom of a broken heart and a grief his father can’t let go of, not even for the sake of his only child. 

He’s drunk and Stiles is blowing through his math homework at the kitchen table at impossible speeds and he leans over, plucks his pen from his hands, and says, “What the hell happened to you, kid? You never used to be this – “

Clever, impossible, broken, damaged, weird, scary, lost. 

“I had a dream,” Stiles says, trying to find the cadence and voice of a ten-year-old and failing. “It punched a hole into my head and now everything keeps getting in.”

He taps at his temple, watches his father’s glassy eyes grow wide with terror, or maybe worry. Slips from his chair and wanders around the table to pour the man another glass, nudges it into his hand. “Drink, Dad, you’ll feel better.”

The Sheriff doesn’t remember the conversation in the morning. 

+

He gets better at pretending, or maybe people just realize he won’t murder them all in their sleep and stop reacting. 

Scott doesn’t get that weirded-out expression around Stiles as often anymore, though, so Stiles decides to count that as a win. 

 

He manages one night out of three without nightmares, now, has learned to keep his mouth shut until the actual questions are asked and keeps to himself when he can, away from humans.

_People._

Other people.

People like he is one. Stiles is human. The Dreamer is only a shadow. 

He wanders a lot. 

One night, during his wanderings, he passes the hospital Claudia died in, human and afraid, mad and sad, and something (someone) inside screams at him without making a single sound. 

He finds Peter Hale in the long term care ward, the ashes and dead souls of his family still ground into his skin and under his nails, the stench still clinging to his hair, because some things don’t wash off. 

(After Arcadia, everything tasted like ozone and death for years and years and then -)

He finds him in a coma, dead to the world, buried under layers of drugs and pain and loss, and he finds him _screaming_. 

“Murder!” he roars, and the wolf curled around him echoes him, howling defiance. Murder. 

Stiles leaves them there, angry and lost, leaves them and for the first time since he was eight, he thinks that maybe there is a point to this, after all. 

+

He researches. 

With his not-mother’s skills and his father’s passwords, it’s not really hard to figure out what really happened. A trap. A fire. A lot of corruption. An ‘accident’. 

He collects it all carefully, keeping prints, DNA and even his own printer out of it, assembling a perfect file of evidence with no trace of himself in it. 

He leaves it at the foot of Peter’s bed with a negligent stroke of his hand down the werewolf’s face, a quiet reassurance. It’ll be okay. 

+

(The night nurse finds the file, wonders who left it there and puts it neatly in the drawer of Peter’s bedside table, where its owner will hopefully find it on their next visit. 

It gathers dust there for more than four years.)

+

His father stops drinking so much, eventually, and Stiles learns to hide the hole in his head, at least from certain angles. 

He lives. 

He does stupid kid stuff with Scott, because it’s normal and nice and boring and doesn’t wake him screaming. 

It’s okay. 

He tries to make friends with Lydia Martin, to bond with her over math, but she ignores his advances for as long as she can and then, when he offers to help her with the college level math problem she’s secretly working on in the library after hours, she screams at him and throws the book at him. 

He leaves with a bruise and never talks to her again. 

+

“Can I make you go away?” he asks the thing at the back of his mind, once. 

Away? The dreamer echoes. Where?

“Out of me. Back in the watch or, wherever.”

Be alone again? Itheshe queries. He doesn’t know if it means him her itself. Herself. The time lord that is not him, but it. 

“Yes,” he says. 

That night, he dreams of Gallifreyan wedding traditions, of a soldier screaming under a bone saw as his arm is amputated without anesthetics, of two separate clumps of metal melting into one and of an entire galaxy, swallowed by a black hole. 

It’s answer enough. 

+

Sometimes, he points out flaws in his father’s reasoning on cases, finds him new leads, new perps, new intel. 

Sometimes he finds him the killer. 

His father gets very drunk on those nights, and won’t look Stiles in the eye. 

Eventually, Stiles stops. 

+

People start dying. 

A girl in the woods, first, and Stiles thinks that maybe he wants to see the body, but then he remembers that he’s already seen enough, battlefields and planets worth of them.

Then a bus driver, a video store clerk, a few creeps out in the woods. Their names, one after the other on his father’s desk, spell out the contents of the file he left with Peter Hale years ago.

The one nothing ever came of. 

Now, there’s a killer going round. 

By the time he works up the courage to go by the hospital, to see if it’s still there, Peter has been declared missing.

Three days later, the bodies of Peter Hale, his nephew, Derek, and one Kate Argent are found in the preserve. All three of them are badly burned. 

Scott’s girlfriend, Allison, spends the few weeks until her parents move her out of town crying into his shoulder. 

Stiles can’t meet her eyes. 

+

He’s seventeen when he decides to reach out, to try and find – there have to be some left. 

There have to be. 

Maybe they can – 

His father won’t stop drinking, Scott spends all his time on the phone with Allison, looking at Stiles the way you look at an idiot dog that keeps doing the same tricks, hoping for treats. Lydia still pretends he doesn’t exist, he’s not allowed to set foot on station premises any longer and there are half a dozen dead people with his name on their graves. 

So he drives out into the preserve, closes his eyes and screams into the void, hoping that something will scream back. 

(Knowing better. Hoping. A part of himself still insists his name is Dreamer.)

+

There is a man in a bowtie at the front door, a cheerful grin on his face, hands dancing along the lapels of his jacket. 

Stiles stares at him, a song of hope and memory at the back of his mind. It’s not his own, but a shadow, a pale imitation of a chorus of a million voices, all singing in harmony, all linked. All alive. 

The man stares back, his twin hearts keeping time. 

“Well?” he asks, “Are you going to invite me in?” 

And then he pushes past Stiles into the house, running his hands over the walls, the pictures, the furniture, touching everything, occasionally sniffing things, looking delighted, looking amazed, until Stiles closes the front door and steps up behind him.

Then the stranger (not, not, never a stranger, Stiles knows these twin hearts) spins on his heel and throws gangly arms around Stiles, hugging him too tightly, pressing close.

Muttering, “I thought I was the last, I thought I was the only one,” in a language Stiles barely remembers, half-forgotten and never learned.

Then, while Stiles is still trying to figure out how to put words to the truth, the man stops, stops, loosens his hold and crouches down just enough to put his ear level with the other’s chest. 

Listens. 

“You’re not,” he finally says, and he sounds _broken_. “I thought you were… you called.”

Stiles gently tugs the man (alien) back up and this time he’s the one hugging, whispering, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

For existing. For being too human. For not being human enough. 

For giving you hope. 

+

The man says his name is the Doctor.

Stiles makes him tea and he spoons five tablespoons of sugar into it before they sit on the steps leading down into the backyard, their shoulders touching, their gazes fixed on the new moon night beyond the tree line. 

Stiles used to play all sorts of games here, when he was still just Stiles, still only a boy. Before he was thousands of years too old to play Pirates and Indians on a Spaceship.

The Doctor tells him, right there on the steps, what happened to Gallifrey (home, home, it was home, once, never). His voice catches and breaks and Stiles remembers fire and screams and the lights in the sky. 

He doesn’t tell the Doctor about that, but he does tell him about a watch and a dead mother and what lives in his skull.

“Oh,” the Doctor says after a long silence, “Oh, I am so sorry that happened to you. The odds – “

Stiles quirks a grin. “Are impossible, I know. A fraction more and my head would have exploded. A little less and I’d be a gibbering wreck.” He taps the side of his head, still shaved, still _bare_ as it was when Claudia died. “Can you fix it? Me?”

He knows the answer already, somewhere in the depth of the Dreamer’s knowledge, but he needs to hear it spoken aloud. In a voice not his own, for once.

“I can take away the memories that aren’t yours, but the damage – the changes to your brain chemistry, to your mind, are done. Can’t fix those.”

His mind sings apology and regret straight into Stiles’ head, mournful and slow.

“I already knew that.”

“I know,” the Doctor returns. They drink their tea in silence. 

+

Sometimes, the Doctor comes and takes him away. On a trip to the moon or a race through a long lost city on Earth, an almost-revolution on a distant planet in the future. 

He always returns Stiles before dawn, flinging him back into the space between one second and the next.

It’s like he was never gone. 

In between, Stiles finishes school, watches Scott move away to be with Allison, watches Lydia drive out of town never to return. Watches his father drink and drink and drink. 

In his head he starts a countdown to the day the man’s liver will give out. 

One day, he meets a former classmate with a shiner at the supermarket. “You shouldn’t let him do this to you,” he tells Isaac. 

A week later, there is a very small blurb in the newspaper, about a recent graduate’s suicide. Abuse suspected. 

Stiles makes two mugs of tea, sits on the back steps and waits.

+

The Doctor comes late (early), picks up the cold mug, takes a sip and grimaces. 

“You rang?” he jokes, and it falls, flat and dead, between their feet. 

In the house to the left, Mrs. Culvert is discovering that her husband is cheating on her. Down the street, someone’s crying. It’s going to rain tomorrow and the Sheriff has 2845 days left to live. Lydia is five years away from her Field’s Medal and Jackson Whittemore is never going to feel good enough. 

Isaac Lahey’s funeral will be on Monday. His father will be under arrest by then, and Isaac never did make any friends. There will be no-one to attend except the priest and the undertaker.

Peter, Laura and Derek Hale are buried only twenty feet away from Isaac’s grave, Kate Argent’s body was incinerated and the Sheriff had to let have a dozen criminals go after Agent McCall found out that the man’s underage son had his hands on the evidence, that he _helped_. 

He never even spoke to Erica Reyes, bit back the urge to help her, somehow, and she faded away to nothingness without anyone really noticing, except her boyfriend, Boyd, who barely speaks anymore.

“What’s the point?”

“Of what?”

“This,” Stiles grates out, grinding the hell of his palm against his temple. “Knowing. Remembering. All of it. What’s the fucking point? Every time I try to use it to help, someone dies, and when I don’t help, people die anyway. Humans look at me like I’m a freak, something broken, something to pity and you can’t really look at me at all for longer than a few hours because I remind you everything you lost and I – “

The Doctor opens his mouth to apologize, but Stiles cuts him off with a sharp swipe of his hand. “Don’t. I know. It’s okay. But why?”

He sounds like a child asking why the sky is blue.

For the longest time, the Doctor just looks at him. 

Then he says, “Of all the ways she had to escape, she picked the Chameleon Arch. Of all the million billion worlds, she picked this one and out of an infinity of moments, she chose the one that led her to your father, who is just one of billions of humans, and they created you out of an infinite combination of DNA, and you became you and then you picked up that watch, a watch that was never yours to find, and you opened it and you became,” he flaps a hand at Stiles.

“You’re made from an infinity of coincidences, Stiles. An accident of time and space and happenstance. There is no point. I’m sorry, but there is no point.”

Stiles thinks he could have borne this, another living in his skull, the entire cosmos pouring in, if it served a purpose. If there was a reason. 

If there was anything, anything at all it was good for.

“I knew that already,” he tells the last Time Lord, quietly. 

The Doctor takes his hand, squeezes. “I know,” he says. 

They sit there together until dawn, when the Doctor leaves with a wheeze and a groan and then Stiles sits there alone for the rest of the day. 

No-one notices. 

+

+

**Author's Note:**

> Come tumble with me [here](http://www.wordsformurder.tumblr.com/).


End file.
